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PowerXpress Support Notebooks Under Linux

03-30-2011, 09:10 PM

Phoronix: PowerXpress Support Notebooks Under Linux

As mentioned this morning when AMD provided Canonical with a Catalyst 11.4 driver pre-release for proprietary Radeon / FirePro support under Ubuntu 11.04, there's more than just support for Linux 2.6.38 kernel and X.Org Server 1.10. This Linux driver update also provides support for AMD PowerXpress with dual-GPU notebooks...

Sounds interesting. I honestly have no clue how it will respond to switching with virtual terminals, but unless there's more that we haven't learned yet, it sounds like the libraries being switched are all X-related. Maybe the virtual terminal always runs off the integrated chip or something? I guess there could be something in place in the kernel drivers to handle multiplexing/demuxing the console stuff.

It'd be interesting to hear some more about how this works, but first we need to track down someone with a system that does this. Would one of the new Macbooks be an appropriate test bed for this software? I only ask because my wife may pick one of these up later this spring/summer.

and changeing/removeing the xorg.conf would even allow to switch to nvidia driver. Basically those things should be done with update-alternatives on a debian/ubuntu system, it is just a hack that you don't need to remove the complete driver in order to use the onboard chip.

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As mentioned this morning when AMD provided Canonical with a Catalyst 11.4 driver pre-release for proprietary Radeon / FirePro support under Ubuntu 11.04, there's more than just support for Linux 2.6.38 kernel and X.Org Server 1.10. This Linux driver update also provides support for AMD PowerXpress with dual-GPU notebooks...

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Those are just tiny mesa vs fglrx switch tools. It is impossible that they do something usefull when you have got amd igp + dedicated. They could be used to switch between intel + amd gfx. But most likely you have to select the card you want to use in the bios.

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I must say after trying Catalyst on my desktop (HD 5850) and then r600g on my laptop (HD 5650) I'd like to claim that r600g is way superior to Catalyst.
Sure, r600g xv is broken (Debian Sid), but the X11 output (in MPlayer) of r600g is way faster than Catalyst xv anyway so why bother until this gets fixed the right way.

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I must say after trying Catalyst on my desktop (HD 5850) and then r600g on my laptop (HD 5650) I'd like to claim that r600g is way superior to Catalyst.
Sure, r600g xv is broken (Debian Sid), but the X11 output (in MPlayer) of r600g is way faster than Catalyst xv anyway so why bother until this gets fixed the right way.

I had an issue playing 1080p files with Xv for a while - it's fixed in Master now, I'm struggling to remember if it was a kernel, libdrm, xf86-video-ati fix

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If they ever implement switching between fglrx and mesa without restarting X it would be interesting even with a computer with just one Radeon card, to use the r600g driver for most of the time and only switch to fglrx when running an app that the mesa driver can not handle.